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We spent a day or two exploring Taupo and Rotorua, located in the actively geothermal area of New Zealand.
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This place is called "Craters of the Moon", just outside Taupo. There weren't any active geysers, but there was smelly sulfurous steam coming out of everywhere, sometimes seemingly coming out of plants. |
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Steam was rising everywhere. |
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This tiny plant was everywhere at Craters of the Moon -- it's called Club Moss. |
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About 30 km from Taupo is Orakei Korako, a privately owned geothermal area. You cross the lake on a little boat and then walk around the trails. |
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The smelly landscape had all kinds of great colors. |
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A series of steps led down to a cave. |
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That night in Rotorua, we went to a "hangi" -- in this case, a Maori dinner theater including food cooked in a hole in the ground, a dance presentation, and then a short "bush walk" in the dark. |
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In the old days these were warriors but now the demographic doing the dances seems to be the Drama Club. |
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The next morning we went to the geysers on the outskirts of Rotorua, which also had a Maori cultural center. Here's the carving over the door inside the carving school there. |
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The chapel ceiling with the pattern seen in the art deco bank. |
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When we got there, two of the geysers (Prince of Wales' Feather and Pohutu) were going off and continued to erupt for about 45 minutes. |
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pools of boiling mud. |
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The mud pools went "splort". |
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A food storage box from back in the day. |
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The skyline of downtown Auckland, where we caught our plane onward. |
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A Lego Harry Potter in the Auckland airport. |
